Never was there writer who kept his feet more firmly on solid earth. He takes nothing for granted; he is satisfied only with the testimony of the senses, and his own senses. Everything--example, allusion, figure of speech, subject and predicate--comes from him in the concrete. Everything is specific, localized, dated. He was in accord with his era that demanded only reality. It is the task of the writer, he declared, "to pierce through our callousness and indifference and give us fresh impressions of things as they really are." How permanent is such work? How valuable is it? Is Nature then a thing simply to be observed and classified and reduced to formulæ? To determine the average day on which the bluebird comes, or the wild geese fly, or the hyla calls, is there virtue in that? To Burroughs, Nature was a thing to be observed accurately for new facts to add to the known. Of Thoreau he wrote: "Ten years of persistent spying and inspecting of Nature and no new thing found out." Do we ask of the poet and the seer simply for mere new material phenomena found out to add to our science? The supreme test that must come at last to all literature is the question: How much of human life is there in it? How much "Thus saith the Lord"? Who seeks for material things with eyes, however keen, and dreams of no sources of the Nile, no vision that may come perchance from supernatural power latent in bird and leaf and tendril, is a scientist, however charming he make his subject or however sympathetic be his attitude. Judged by such a standard, Burroughs falls short, far short of a place with the highest. He must decrease, while Thoreau increases. He must be placed at last among the scientists who have added facts and laws, while Thoreau is seated with the poets and the prophets. But though he be thus without vision and without message, save as an invitation to come to material Nature and learn to observe is a message, Burroughs has a charm of manner and a picturesqueness of material that are to be found in few other writers of the period. His power lies in his simplicity and his sincerity. He is more familiar with his reader than Thoreau. He is never literary, never affected; he talks in the most natural way in the world; he tells story after story in the most artless way of homely little happenings that have passed under his own eye, and so charming is his talk that we surrender ourselves like children to listen as long as he will. When we read Thoreau we are always conscious of Thoreau. His epithets, his distinction of phrase, his sudden glimpses, his unexpected turns and climaxes, his humor, for in spite of Lowell's dictum, he is full of humor, keep us constantly in the presence of literature; but with Burroughs we are conscious of nothing save the birds and the season and the fields. We are walking with a delightful companion who knows everything and who points out new wonders at every step.